Idea for new utility - graphic representation of pennant races

[rcbuss]

I've seen this done before. There's a book out there called Baseball's Pennant Races: A Graphic View by John W. Davenport that details this beautifully.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...glance&s=books

This is an excerpt from a review at the Amazon website:

"John Warner Davenport's 1981 book "Baseball's Pennant Races: A Graphic View" presents a series of graphs showing every American and National League pennant race from 1901-1980. When you think of the nature of pennant races, from wild season-long battles between two or more teams to runaways by one dominant team, chances are the way these graphs look is the way you'd see those races in your mind.

"For all of the marquee races during this span -- the 1908 chases in both leagues; the 1920 American League battle between the Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees; the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Giants tussle; the Philadelphia Phillies' 1964 collapse that created a heated four-team struggle; and others, Davenport gives us "close-up" graphs, that chronicle each day's scores over a period of one or more months. These closeups really give an insight into what was actually happening to these teams day by day, and in some cases, what effect teams outside the race were having on the final result.

"In the regular, more broad-based graphs, we get a glimpse at interesting also-rans who were either on the rise -- like the Philadelphia Athletics of 1926-28, right before their domination of the American League over the following three seasons -- or on the way down. These are indicated by bolder lines in Davenport's graphs (as are the teams who won the race). "

In the database created by the Cato OOTP History utility, there is a table named Games, that gives the date and score of every game from that year. I do not know enough about Access and Excel to write a program that would create a graph depicting a league's pennant race (x-axis: date, y-axis: games above/below .500), but I figure that it wouldn't be too hard to do.